Dave Smith (10:21)
Okay, all right, so let's pause it right there. Okay, so this is. Look, I mean, the, the whole, like, well, listen, war crimes are always committed. And you know, it's like. All right, yeah, this seems like a bit of mental gymnastics to get yourself to support the side that's committing war crimes that you can't even deny are being committed. And as far as the whole argument about Hamas commits war crimes to their own people. So, like, the Palestinians are ones to get a double dose of this war of these war crimes? Well, I don't know. I. I don't exactly know. I. I'd have to, like, I'd be interested almost to prod with questions here of Coleman of what exactly he is saying, because obviously the Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th and Hamas. Does Hamas commit war crimes against the Palestinians? Like, okay, fine, but if you're going to say that a government, you know, like, again, Hamas is not a government, but let's just say historically, like any, any regime, including the United States of America, is the idea that they would, while they're at war externally also crack down and have authority. Authoritarian policies against their own people is not unique. There's nothing unique about that. And that is the norm. That that is almost. I'm struggled to find an example where that wasn't the case. I mean, like, what do you think the commies were doing to their own people while they were fighting wars? Or what do you. I mean, the Americans, you know, rounded up Japanese, cracked down on civil liberties, instituted the draft, punished draft dodgers. I mean, there was all types of like, you know, whether you wouldn't call them war crimes. But I'm just saying, like, the idea that the people of a country, when there's a war, get it from their own regime as well as the regime attacking them is not particularly unique. And of course it like the argument that, oh, the Palestinians are getting it so bad from Hamas, doesn't therefore absolve the Israelis, have given it bad to the Palestinians. If anything, that just makes you feel that much worse for them. So I don't agree with that at all. But then of course, he pivots to really what is the kind of only defense that like that it seems like the people who are, are still supporting what Israel's doing are left with, which is just essentially the assertion that the Israeli motives are pure. Like Israel's the good guys because they don't want this. They don't want to be. They want to live in peace with their neighbors, whereas Hamas is the bad guys because all they want to do is kill people. And he could say, you know, almost like preemptively, he goes, oh, yeah, yeah, sure, there are some right wing factions, you know, there are. But that's like Marjorie Taylor Green is a congressman, AOC is a congresswoman. But that doesn't really speak toward government, government policy. The problem is that the right wingers that you're talking about in Israel, like, say like the right wingers who don't want to live in peace with their neighbors are like Benjamin Netanyahu Smotrich, you know, like, I mean, cats. Like the guys who are in the upper echelons of power. Those are the guys. There's likud Party founded by Menachem Begin. Like this. These are the guys. Yes, they are those right wingers who don't want. So this isn't like saying. This isn't like talking about AOC or. Or Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2025. This is more like talking about the neoconservatives in 2004, you know, like, the people who occupied, like, all of the positions of power within our federal government and so. Or a huge number of them and who are getting their policy enacted. So, no, this isn't like some fringe element. We're talking about the leaders and the policy that they are enacting. So, like, you know, this is what they try to say when they're like, you know, oh, it's like on Pierce Morgan almost every episode now. He'll bring up something Smotrich said, and people will go, oh, that's just one guy. But, like, he's their finance minister. Like, he is the guy who announced that not one grain of wheat would get into Gaza for those three months that they had no food coming in. So he can't just, like, say, oh, that's just. That's Marjorie Taylor Greene. No, it's not. It's one of the three most powerful people in government talking about the policy that he is enacting right now. And in fact, when he threatened to quit the government a few months back, Netanyahu was, like, made sure to keep him on board. So this is. That's just not true. And so if you're gonna say, I. I don't like, you know, I get into these arguments all the time. Like, one, the. The one that I had the other day where. And this is kind of how defenders of Western aggression typically operate. But so when I was arguing with this guy, I can't remember his name, when I was arguing this guy in Piers Morgan the other day, you know, he said at one point, you know, he said the dumb line about Neville Chamberlain or whatever, and I was making fun of him for that. And then he goes. He goes, well, you don't understand, you know, that you can't appease dictators. And I was like, we appease dictators all over the globe all the time. What are you talking about? Like, what is it that you can't appease dictators? The US Props up the House of Saud and the Jordanian King and, you know, the, like, all around the region, we prop up dictator. We've. We've overthrown democratically elected governments and installed dictators many times in the past. It's like, what Are you talking about this? But that's, it's like a bumper sticker line. No, we don't appease dictator. We believe in democracy. And what it really is doing, if you think about it, is it's ascribing, ascribing intentions. It's ascribing the purest of intentions, as if what's going on, you know, what's driving us foreign policy is that we are just. We oppose dictatorship, we believe in democracy, but that's obviously not the case. And so you can't. It doesn't make sense to judge governments based off, like the rosiest interpretation of what you believe their motives are, even when everything they do completely contradicts the idea that that's their motives. Like it's the, the idea that you're still supposed to sit there after we're in bed with all of these dictators and just say, oh, we're just against dictatorship. It's the same thing as saying Israel wants to live in peace with their neighbors. Israel does not. Israel has never been at peace with their neighbors. That's just a fact. No matter whose side. If you want to blame it all on the other side, okay. But Israel has never been at peace with their neighbors. They've been at war with the Palestinians since the creation of the state of Israel. There has never been peace. There may have been some periods of ceasefire, but this is long war that's been going on since at least 1947. And you know, the, the people who are in power, you know Benjamin Netanyahu, like I always talk about the clean break strategy and all of that, but the clean break memo was written to Benjamin Netanyahu. And what was the break from? The break was from Oslo. And don't use any of the later excuses about the second Intifada or Camp David or any of that stuff. This was in 1996. This was only a couple years after Yitzhak Rabin had signed on to the Oslo Accords. Netanyahu has always represented the faction that was against a two state solution. So don't tell me you're trying to live in peace with your neighbors when your plan is to dominate them in perpetuity. Benjamin NETanyahu, was it two weeks before October 7, went to the UN with the map that had all of Gaza and all of the west bank as part of Israel. So if what you mean by live in peace with them is annex them, okay. But, you know, I don't think that's not exactly what most of us describe as peace. All right, let's keep playing.